THE LINGUISTIC NATURE OF PHRASAL VERBS: SOME SCIENTIFIC VECTORS OF THEIR STUDYING

Abstract

Phrasal verbs are recognized to constitute a vast section of the English vocabulary. Recent theoretical developments have revealed that there are various nominations of phrasal verbs in modern linguistics such as “two-word verbs”, “discontinuous verbs”, “multi-word verbs”, “verbal collocations” etc. Researchers have always seen a phrasal verb as a combination of a verb with a preposition or an adverb, or simultaneously with both of these parts of speech; it appears as one member of the sentence and, thus, forms a coherent semantic construction. The uniqueness of English phrasal verbs lies in the fact that despite the lexical and semantic changes that these formations underwent in the process of language development, they retained a separately formed character or “phrasal”. A close attention to the phrasal verbs of both linguists and methodologists is caused by their high communicative value providing unlimited opportunities to express virtually any concept. Phrasal verbs are an almost innumerable group of verbs, which in combination with various prepositions or adverbs are able to acquire a variety of new meanings. Phrasal verbs have a number of specific features: semantic relations between the constituent parts of phrasal verbs, polysemy, variety, idiomaticity. Obviously, popularity of phrasal verbs (their usage in oral as well as in written speech) is explained by their semantic conciseness and great informativeness. Functioning of phrasal verbs in English is directly related to the mobility of these language combinations, their ability to acquire new and transform existing lexical meanings for spreading them to new concepts and phenomena. It should be stated that a distinctive feature of phrasal verbs is a different degree of cohesion and a different nature of the influence of adjacent elements on the meaning of a phrasal verb. This fact makes them an interesting subject for analysis within various scientific approaches: in terms of phraseology, taxonomic (semantic) and cognitive vectors